Saturday, January 10, 2009

Corporate Big-Timmers Making Small Strides Their Forte

Despite time of fiscal uncertainty and amidst the myriad of layoffs and unemployment, many people are forgoing the traditional safe route of landing a position at a large company and retiring with major benefits.

CNN.com had a great story chronicling a Google-ite who shunned the corporate to begin his own start up.

This trend has not been lost on Cincinnatians.

I have a close friend that visited over the holidays who decided not to take a high paying job at any pick of technology companies and instead branched out on his own. He now moves from city to city throughout world, creating applications for cell phones among other things. He is currently living in Spain.

Locally, several of my other friends have left a pretty lucrative careers at the University of Cincinnati and Duke Energy to work for STOP AIDS, a local non-profit dedicated to serving the GLBT community of Cincinnati.

I even left a government job, a place where retirement is common and highly suggested, just last year so that I could put more of my energy to getting my fledgling start ups going (shameless plug...see my companies at ION Consultants and 15 West Publishing).

Though Cincinnati may be the home of the largest corporate entity in the free world, it would be great to see more people take chances like this.